The Great Toy Raid

The top pic is the guest house, the middle is the nursery, and the picture above is two of the nursery kids...."Where are our toys!" The pics were taken by a fellow volunteer, Kate Merritt, who is from Canada.




In January 2010, I had the merit to volunteer at the Home of Hope Orphanage in Mchinji District, Malawi, Africa. It is a wonderful place with lots of kids but not that many toys. The orphanage nursery has several shelves of donated toys...some of them are inappropriate on account of they require batteries, some were broken and unsafe, some were down right creepy! (see Toy Story pic of the doll....that will give you nightmares!) and they were all dirty - when I picked them up, moths flew out and spiders scurried off. Anyway, there are lots of kids and not that many adults to watch over them and to take care of their toys so I took it upon myself to take the toys from the nursery up to the guest house, to clean them in the guest house bath tub, and return them to the nursery. (I'm laughing thinking of this story.)



So what happens is that I go to the nursery, pick up a couple bags of toys, take them to the guest house tub and when there is water, fill the tub and soak the toys in a little bleach for a few hours. Then rinse, rewash with a little detergent, rinse again and now what? I have a tub full of soft and stuffed toys and no dryer! The toys come out of the tub and I'm thinking the front porch of the guest house will be a good place to dry them. I string a line across the porch and hang some of the toys on the line. Toys are placed all along the ledge of porch. Toys are set up on the edge of the stairs and on the porch floor - all in the sun to dry. Toys are everywhere! They are bright and clean and of course, totally irresistible to kids who don't have any toys.



The process sounds fairly easy but it's not. It's hard. Water isn't easy to come by, bleach had to be borrowed from the clinic of Dolly, the nurse, and bending over the tub washing, rinsing and scrubbing was something I certainly wasn't used to doing. The toys had to be washed and rinsed three times until they were clean but at the end of the day, they were looking pretty good. By night fall, they hadn't totally dried so I decided to leave them out on the porch until bedtime. (You've GOT to know what's coming...).



It was near 9:00 (bedtime) and I was sitting at the table with fellow volunteers Phil, Gaby and Mark when Gaby said, "Did you hear something?" She turned on the porch light and looked out the window and spotted two or three boys running off the porch. They had taken all of the soft toys that were hanging on the bungee cord clothes line, all of the toys drying on a towel on the floor, and most of the toys that were drying on the walls of the porch! My first thought was selfish, poor me, all that work to clean the nursery toys and see what happened? I'm ashamed of that first thought but feel I should be honest with myself and my readers. My second thought was for the nursery kids....they lost about a quarter of their toys but really folks, they weren't that great to begin with. My third thought was that I had to tell Lucy, the orphanage director, about the boys and what they did....they aren't supposed to be on the guest house porch without permission and for sure they aren't supposed to steal! And the last and most important thought, Well what did you expect, Kathy? All of these colorful toys are hanging on a line and on the wall of the guest house and they are just BEGGING to be stolen!



I told Lucy the next day....I thank God I was unable to identify the boys!....she wished that they had been caught and taken to her for discipline. She is very loving and tolerant but I think the boys may have been slapped up side the head for their actions that night! One of the soft blocks were returned to the guest house the next day - a worker found it in the yard. I can imagine a little boy running through the corn in the dark, holding toys in his shirt and losing one and I chuckle thinking of his dilemma!



The nursery babies will never miss those lost toys...they are too young. At first, I felt bad the boys stole the toys - it's not good to steal, right? But when Mark said laughingly, "Kathy, I think there has been a raid!", I realized the situation was too tempting to the little boys and really, what was I thinking? It is not good to steal but for sure it is not good to set up a situation to tempt them to that extent! I hope the little boys have lots of fun playing with those toys! I wish that there were enough toys for the nursery and for the little boys, too, but there are not. If you can help make their lives a little more fun, please contact http://www.raisingmalawi.org/ to make a tax deductible donation and designate the Home of Hope Orphanage as the recipient.